Comment by kmarc
15 hours ago
Essentially I'm running everything on flash now inside pi. With the correct set of MCP servers, context reducer tooling and skills it can implement any task I throw at it. Some sessions take 30+ turns, but it's fast and cheap; all this in an hour, with ~$0.5 cost.
(TBH though, in my multi-subagent workflow I do use other, more expensive models for planning, reviewing, oracle-ing)
I haven't used our slow opus subscription for weeks.
(Also set up an OpenWebUi self-hosted chat that works from my phone, has some mcp and skills. fully replaced perplexity. Monthly cost ~$18 for hosting and subscriptions)
I want to second this, I use the same setup (pi + deepseek, with lots of custom tools for tracking TODOs, doing things with less tokens, etc, and with a SOTA model for very difficult tasks) and it's all I need it to be.
Do you have any recommendations of such extensions for pi?
Recommendation? No. Just go with the passive-aggressive advice "let pi build it for you". :-)
To be more constructive, what I did (as an experiencd SWE but a complete noob to agentic coding): went to pi.dev's extension marketplace and looked into all the new shiny stuff. Subagents, mcps, context and memory optimizers, skills. Using the most popular ones (not necessarily the best ones)
It was like 15years ago learning the new mindset of vim (and spending a ton of time to customize it to my workflow). My understanding is that Claude and opencode doesn't give you this flexibility.
Learning all these stuff drove me to also set up openwebui, and it was such a successful private project that I implemented it at work (with jira/confluence/bazel query access) and management said "we need this by tomorrow".
I believe the models matter not that much anymore. The "harness" does. (unless you just want to vibe code. Thebn, throw crap at fable and call it a day)
I found that opencode absolutely lets you do everything that pi does. With a few niceties in the UI on top.
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Got it :-)
This is self promotional but I am working on making pi extremely enterprise ready with:
https://github.com/gitsense/pi-brains/tree/staging
The README is being worked on but the three videos should give you a good sense of what it can do. Pi is also what makes what I will demo in
https://github.com/gitsense/chat/tree/update-readme
possible. Since Pi exposes so much, it is very easy to build advanced tooling around it to help easily grok hundreds of tool calls to help you understand what they agent knows and what it has tried.
Happy with oh-my-pi (omp)
I looked into it but, at least for me, it goes against the entire philosophy of pi :-)
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I've had a lot of fun with https://omp.sh/ - consider it like zsh -> ohmyzsh
Lots of sensible defaults and good tweaks/settings you just don't worry about.
pi-role-model
Do you notice any improvements with this update?
Not sure, haven't tried it today.
Last night it single handedly implemented a feature after a grilling session, and came back with the red-yellow-green risk assessment points that I mostly saw with anthropic models. I had to check if I'm using the right model, but it was DS4Flash.
So maybe I was using it already?
Possibly depending on who's routing it, since Openrouter seems to have added a separate slug for this, and they don't have an alias router for the DS models yet, so it shouldn't have swapped over to it in case you use them for routing.
If you are directly using it through Deepseek, they do mention that the flash slug has migrated over
How can one set topp and temperature in pi?
You build it as an extension or create your own fork/copy of pi and add it. This basically goes for most things in pi, except the most basic stuff. It's basically meant for people who think "I'll just add that myself" rather than expecting it to be there out of the box or finding other's solution to it, for better or worse.